The leaders of the political alliance that won Italy's general election, pictured during the final event of the campaign, on 22 September 2022 in Rome. From left, Matteo Salvini (Lega), Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia), Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d'Italia, expected to become prime minister) and Maurizio Lupi (Noi con l'Italia). Credit: Riccardo Fabi/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Regardless of how they voted on 25 September, Italians can all agree that the next government faces a daunting term.
Italy’s 19th legislature and 68th government take office during one of the worst economic, social and environmental crises seen in decades. The war in Ukraine has led to skyrocketing prices for gas and electricity, threatening the survival of industries and the welfare of millions of people. This shock has hit when the Italian economy was just starting to rebound from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, before which, Italy had been weakened by decades of stagnant growth that no government has really managed to reverse.
For its first months, the new government will have to focus on responding to the emergency. Keeping the economy afloat, preserving jobs and making sure that the most vulnerable people in society get through the next winter will be its first imperatives.
But if Italy wants to do more than just go from one crisis to the other, it needs a clear vision of the role of higher education, research, and innovation.
Those themes received little attention during the election campaign and were mentioned only in passing in the programmes of many parties. Before the elections, we tried to learn more about their policies by asking some questions on research, health, universities and climate. Some of the answers were detailed and informed, others less so. Some proposals would be welcome by most scientists, others would get them worried. But because a worsening economy may force parties to reconsider their electoral promises, and because we received no answer from the winning party and one of its main coalition partners, it is too early to tell what the actual policies will be. But it is not too early to remind of what they should not be.
When we launched Nature Italy, we wrote that the recovery plan launched by the European Union in response to the pandemic was creating “a chance – possibly the last one – for the country to reinvent itself, and to finally wake up to the importance of science and innovation for growth and for the welfare of its citizens”.
Two years later, the chance is still there, but so is the risk of wasting it. Italy remains below the OECD and UE averages when it comes to research funding, and to access to higher education. The previous government has used the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) to try to reverse the trend. New initiatives have been launched, including national centers and partnerships between universities and research institutes, grants modeled on the ERC ones, PhD programmes. Reactions in the scientific community have been mixed. While every increase in funding is welcome, many had hoped for more attention to basic research, more transparent competition between different proposals, and more opportunities for young researchers. And many now fear that the PNRR may turn out into a missed opportunity, distributing resources among too may groups instead of awarding solid and innovative research proposals, thus failing to achieve a clear impact on competitiveness.
It is vital that work on the PNRR improves in the next legislature, and that any budget adjustment made necessary by the economic crisis does not take resources from education, research, health – as has too often happened in the past. The next government will have to make sure that research money is well spent and that deadlines are met, engaging in a transparent revision process and discussing with young, productive researchers on how to make the best of this opportunity. Most of all, it will have to come up with a clear plan for what to do after 2026, when European money will stop flowing. Those investments were always meant to be a steppingstone towards the future, not a one-off bonanza. On this, the new government does not need to start from scratch, but can rely on proposals for new investments and reforms prepared by an expert group created by the outgoing research Minister.
The new government will inherit important reforms initiated by the previous ones, such as the reform of the National Research Council or of the University recruitment process. There is room for improvement on the latter, which currently pays more attention to the teaching aspect of university careers than to research ones. For these and future reforms, politics should keep an open dialogue with the scientific community, which has at times felt shut out of the decision process during the first phase of the PNRR.
One of the essential challenges for the next five years will be to plan the future of Italy’s energy system. The country has a huge potential for exploiting renewables, but the rate of installations of wind and solar power has been disappointing compared to other European countries. The next government should not use the energy crisis as an excuse to lose sight of emission reduction targets and should push towards electrification and installing new renewable capacity. At the same time, Italy’s national climate adaptation plan, that was drafted in 2018 and then left on a shelf, must be updated and approved.
Then there’s health. The pandemic has highlighted the damages that decades of budget cuts have done to Italy’s public health system, as well as flaws in its regional organization that must be corrected. The recovery plan includes 20 billion euros for reinforcing territorial healthcare, creating a state-of-the-art infrastructure to collect and analyse public health data, strengthening biomedical research inside the public health system – on rare diseases that are neglected by private research. A large share of this sum still must be spent, and it will be the next government’s responsibility to use it to reduce regional and social inequalities in access to quality healthcare. A resurgence of COVID-19 during the winter cannot be ruled out. If it comes, it must be faced by relying on the evidence that show vaccines are the best line of defense.
The next government should also take decisions that have been postponed for too long and that create uncertainties for many Italian researchers. One example is a selective ban on animal experiments for substance of abuse and xenotransplants, that has been repeatedly averted at the very last minute and could now enter into force in 2025. Another one is the status of new genomic techniques in agriculture, on which Italy has several promising research projects that mostly stop before being tested in the field because of hostile regulations.
Promising more investments in research and science-based policy may not bring votes during a campaign, but now the campaign is over, and a government that cares about Italy must realize that the current crisis is the result of many wrong choices over the past decades, that have made Italy more vulnerable in an increasingly unstable and insecure world. Neglecting investments in science, education and health has been one of those wrong choices, reiterated by many past governments. Doing it again would not help this crisis and would only make the next ones worse.
